Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to make some brief remarks on this report of the Australia-Indonesia Institute, and I want to reiterate the comments my good friend Senator Hogg made about the importance not only of this institute but of Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. As I am from Western Australia, parts of Indonesia are much closer to my home base of Perth than most of the rest of Australia is. I have gone on the record more than once in this place to say it is much easier for me to get to Bali than to get to Canberra—and often much more enjoyable when I get there, I must say.

But having said that, and taking the flippancy out of it, one of the significant activities of the Australia-Indonesia Institute is an annual dialogue that they sponsor and conduct between people they consider to be young leaders in business, in academia, in politics and in the media. Last year I was fortunate to be one of the four politicians who attended that. It was really brought home to me that it was an important forum to be part of. It was two days of intensive exchange of ideas and views on a number of the issues confronting both of our nations, and very free and frank exchanges of ideas and views. But it also led to the establishment of some ongoing relationships. As Senator Hogg has referred to, recently there was the delegation of Indonesian parliamentarians from Indonesian Commission 1. One of those parliamentarians had taken part in that dialogue that I was part of, so already he had an understanding of and a relationship with some Australian politicians and with some other people from the various federal and state bureaucracies. I think it was a really dynamic and important way of establishing a good and open dialogue between our two nations.

Indonesia is one of the younger democracies in our region, and it certainly is a democracy these days. I think it is important that we place on record our congratulations to that nation and those people for making that transition to democracy. It is a lively democracy; there have been comings and goings of governments and political parties in the short time that it has been open and democratic. I know this parliament has done everything that it can to ensure that their elections have been conducted in a free and open way.

I note the government is now using the Australia-Indonesia Institute as a bit of a model for conducting dialogues with other nations in our region. There is an Australia-Thailand Institute, for example. I think it really is a significant and good development for creating closer understanding and cooperation. My only caveat on that would be that that cooperation and understanding are at good levels among what they call the elites of our communities. The challenge for the institute, those of us in this place and the respective governments of our nations is to encourage that understanding and cooperation further down in our community. It is very easy for some of us to get a bit ahead of ourselves and not take the community with us in an understanding of the dynamics of our region and the importance of the issues that we deal with when coming together.

When I took part in the annual dialogue, obviously we discussed the issues of terrorism and security within our region; illegal fishing—which I am sure Senator Ian Macdonald will raise, so even though I am from Western Australia I do not feel the need to highlight them; and the portrayal in the media of some of the cultural differences. I think there needs to be a lot more sensitivity, and perhaps the institute and others need to do a bit more work with the Australian media on how we portray people from Indonesia and people of their faith in our media. There were also the issues of broader understanding of the ways the nations work and of conducting our relationship in a harmonious, cooperative and sensitive manner rather than with some of the megaphone diplomacy that has taken place either with some of our other neighbours or in the past.